Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán
after his arrest in January 2016.Centro Federal de Readaptación
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The fugitive drug lord Joaquín "El
Chapo" Guzmán
has finally been recaptured after escaping from a Mexican
prison. He may end up serving time in a notorious US "supermax"
facility.

To get an idea of how the
elusive and monied drug
trafficker operates, it helps to look at an indictment
filed against him in a federal court in Florida in 2010. It is
one of
several indictments he faces in the US.

Guzmán and his Sinaloa cartel
controlled as much as 35% of the cocaine produced in Colombia,
and the Florida indictment links Guzmán to Colombian
traffickers known as the Cifuentes Villa clan. It alleges they
conspired to manufacture cocaine, ship it through Latin America,
and distribute it in the US.

Guzmán's partnership with the Cifuentes Villa clan likely allowed
his cartel to extend its influence over Colombian cocaine
production and expand its control over global cocaine trafficking
— a billion-dollar industry.

The Sinaloa cartel's primary supplier

The indictment names Jorge Milton Cifuentes
Villa, the purported leader of the group, his brother,
Hildebrando, and his sister, Dolly, as Guzmán’s coconspirators.

Jorge Cifuentes is “allegedly responsible for financing and
coordinating multi-ton cocaine shipments via speedboats, fishing
vessels, and airplanes to the United States via Ecuador and
Mexico," according to an information sheet put out by the State Department in
2011.

"Since 2008, he most likely has obtained and imported over 31,000
kilograms [68,343 pounds] of cocaine to the United States, and is
purportedly the primary source of … cocaine for the Sinaloa
Cartel in Mexico," the information sheet noted.

The indictment alleges that between 2003 and 2008, Guzmán and the
Cifuentes Villa clan made agreements in Colombia and in Guatemala
to produce, transport, and distribute cocaine. The Cifuentes
Villa network is detailed in the organizational chart below,
compiled by the US Treasury Department (click to expand):

An
organizational chart of the Cifuentes Villa clan compiled by the
US Treasury Department.US
Treasury Department

A family of alleged drug traffickers

The Cifuentes Villa clan was one of the most prominent groups among Colombian
traffickers and had been involved in trafficking for more
than 20 years, according to Insight Crime.

Jorge Cifuentes posed as a businessman working in Mexico,
Panama, and Ecuador, and he had a least six businesses in Mexico
set up to launder money, according to a review of public registries
done by Mexico City-based daily Proceso in 2011.

The clan worked with Escobar's Medellin cartel (Jorge’s brother,
Francisco, reportedly worked as a pilot for Escobar), and then
for the Oficina de Envigado, which assumed much of Medellin cartel's operations
after Escobar's death in 1993.

The Cifuentes Villas also worked with the Norte del Valle cartel, which took over the
Cali cartel's operations in the late 1990s. The family also
partnered with the paramilitary group known as the United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary
group that operated in Colombia from the late 1990s
until the late 2000s.

Despite the charges in Florida, none of the members of
Cifuentes Villa clan who have been caught have
actually been tried there.

Despite declines in some
areas, the amount of cocaine seized at the points on the US
border adjacent to Sinaloa cartel territory in 2014 is comparable
to the amount seized near areas controlled by other
cartels.DEA 2015
NDTA

The connection between the Sinaloa cartel and the Cifuentes Villa
clan seems to be but one facet of the Mexican cartel’s operations
in Colombia, which produces 90% of the cocaine found in the US.

"In Colombia, [the Sinaloa cartel] already directs 50% of the
drugs that leave from [the ports of] Tumaco, Buenaventura, and
el Urabá, which form a network with ports in Peru (El Callao
and Talara), Ecuador (Esmeraldas and San Lorenzo) and
Guatemala," according to intelligence documents seen by El
Tiempo ...

Drugs are shipped by fastboat from Colombia, primarily to
Guatemala's Puerto Quetzal, which handles almost all of the
cocaine coming out of Colombia. The Mexico/Central America
corridor handles 87% of the cocaine that reaches the US,
according to the DEA.

'It's a very complicated process'

While the 2010 indictment from Florida sheds light on Guzmán's
ties to Colombian cocaine, it does little to clear up where the
kingpin will face trial in the US if he's extradited from Mexico.

US attorneys in six states, including New York, Florida, and
California, have indictments pending against Guzmán.

The San Diego district office, which first brought charges
against him in 1996; the Chicago district, which has more
available witnesses, including Vicente Niebla-Zambada, the son of
a Sinaloa cartel leader; and the Brooklyn office, which was
previously led by current US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, are
the venues where the drug lord will likely end up, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Justice Department "will pick the ... case with the
highest chance of success," Carl Pike, a former top DEA official,
told the LA Times.

As much as US prosecutors may want to try him, and as
anxious as Mexican officials are to be rid of him, the
"reality is extradition takes a long time," David Shirk, a
professor at the University of San Diego and director of the
school's Justice in Mexico program, told Business Insider in the hours after Guzmán
was recaptured on January 8.

"It's a very complicated process ... especially cases like
this, where the individual in question has a lot of resources to
challenge extradition in court."

The full indictment from the US attorney for the Southern
District of Florida can be seen below:

This post as been updated to correct when Loretta Lynch
served as US attorney in Brooklyn.